September 16

When you think about the people who have impacted your life in good ways, notice how you don’t always have perfect words for how they made you feel...Because somewhere out there, someone doesn’t quite have the words to describe what you meant to them, too.

It can be hard to make sense of it this way because it tends to be easier for your head to make lists of everything you wish had been said...all the times it felt like a galaxy might explode in the silence between you, only for you to be left with nothing more than a flicker of a distant star...

I hope you know it’s okay to feel the magnitude of that distance while also knowing: you matter to people in more ways than you know. And you haven’t seen the end of all the ways love can grow.

And through joy, grief, forever-goodbyes, and goodbyes-for-now, somehow, you might eventually find room to say:

“I have been alive in this life with a full heart, learning from all the connections I’ve made along the way.”